I don’t like to look too much at the annual posts on many sites about ‘Photography Books of the Year‘, not least because if I spend too much time reading them I will invariably find some I feel I really need to buy. And while I could usually afford to do so in terms of cash, I just do not have the space. Virtually every room in my house now has its shelves of photography books (and there are some in the loft) and there is just no room for any more. (We do have a few non-photography books too, but they are well in a minority.)
So over the past few years I’ve adopted in fairly strict rule. I only buy books by photographers I know. I’ve stopped asking for review copies some years ago too, though I won’t review books from PDFs – unless they are being published in that format – it just isn’t the same. I’m still pleased when people give me books, and I’ll try and find room for them, but I’ll really have to find something I already have that I feel I can do without to give away or at least move up to a box in the loft.
I’ve already posted about my book of the year – and a very thick one that I have bought – Provoke. I needed it for a talk I was writing, but I still haven’t found a place for it, and it’s in a pile of stuff on the carpet behind me. I see in my guilty sneaked glimpses that it has featured in some other people’s lists too.
Currently I’m sitting on my hands and thinking about hiding my credit card after having taking a peek at the recommendations by Elizabeth Avedon, at least some of which seem more to my taste than most, Part 1 and Part 2.
I see at the right of her pages it has a counter recording ‘PEOPLEVIEWS’, which stood at 1,863,069 when I visited. I don’t have such a counter on this site, but I can get some statistics from my ISP, though I don’t know what a ‘Peopleview’ is.
At the moment I can only get statistics for the past 18 months, from 1st July 2015, although the site has been running since December 2006. Last year, 2016 >Re:PHOTO had 1,558,105 page impressions by 372,417 visitors.
The numbers fluctuate a bit through the year, with August and December being my best months last year, each average over 5500 page views per day. I suspect that I wrote more posts in these months and more people have time to read them because we have some holidays from work. Anyway, thanks for reading!